The Work
The Epistle to the Romans (Der Romerbrief) was first published by G.A. Baur (Bern) in 1919. The radically revised second edition, which is the version that achieved historical importance, was published by Chr. Kaiser Verlag (Munich) in 1922. The two editions differ so substantially that they are virtually different books: the 1919 edition is still marked by liberal hermeneutical assumptions; the 1922 edition is the bombshell. The standard English translation of the second edition, by Sir Edwyn Hoskyns, was published by Oxford University Press in 1933. The commentary runs to approximately 550 pages.
Karl Adam's famous description of the second edition's publication -- "a bombshell on the playground of the theologians" -- has been quoted ever since as the measure of the work's impact. Barth himself, in a 1963 preface, described the book as the work of "a man who has not yet learned to swim and yet who jumped into the water."
Biblical Engagement
The commentary engages Paul's letter not as a historical-critical document to be recovered in its original setting but as a word of God addressed directly to every generation -- what Barth would later call the "strange new world of the Bible." His method was to read Romans as if it had been written today, allowing its message to judge and transform the reader rather than allowing the reader to explain and domesticate it.
Romans 1:16-17 ("For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth... For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith") is the text that drives the entire commentary. Barth reads this as the declaration of God's absolute priority over all human religious seeking. The "righteousness of God" (dikaiosyne theou) is not a quality that humans can achieve or merit but an event of divine judgment and grace that breaks vertically into human history.
Romans 3:21 ("But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe") is read by Barth as the declaration of a radical newness -- "but now" -- that ruptures the continuity of human religious history. This newness cannot be prepared for, earned, or anticipated by human religion or culture; it arrives from outside.
Romans 6:11 ("Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord") provides Barth with his account of Christian existence as the paradoxical life of those who have died and been raised with Christ. The Christian lives "between the times" -- in the world but no longer of it, already dead to sin but not yet visibly risen.
Romans 8:18 ("For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us") is read eschatologically: the distinction between present suffering and future glory is not a consolation for the present but a fundamental reorientation of perspective. The "not yet" of eschatological hope radically relativizes all present achievements, including religious and theological ones.
Author and Context
Karl Barth (1886-1968) was born in Basel, Switzerland, the son of a Reformed pastor and New Testament scholar. He studied theology in Bern, Berlin, Tubingen, and Marburg, where he came under the influence of the great liberal theologians Wilhelm Herrmann and Adolf von Harnack. He was ordained in the Reformed church and served as a parish minister in Safenwil, an industrial town in the Swiss Aargau, from 1911 to 1921.
The 1914 manifesto of the German intellectuals supporting the Kaiser's war -- signed by ninety-three leading German cultural figures, including most of Barth's theological teachers -- shattered his confidence in liberal theology's equation of the Kingdom of God with the progress of Western civilization. He later described this as the moment he realized that his teachers had "no exegesis, no ethics, no dogmatics, no preaching" adequate to the crisis.
Barth threw himself into Paul's letter to the Romans as a pastor desperately needing something to say to his congregation in wartime. The result was the first edition of 1919 and the explosive second edition of 1922. The second edition, shaped by his encounter with Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and the "existential" critique of bourgeois religion, announced what would become neo-orthodoxy or dialectical theology.
Critical Reception
The second edition caused an immediate sensation in German-speaking theological circles. The generation of young theologians who had lost confidence in liberal theology found in Barth's commentary a new orientation. Emil Brunner, Friedrich Gogarten, Eduard Thurneysen, and Rudolf Bultmann formed the loose circle of "dialectical theologians" around Barth in the 1920s, though by the 1930s significant differences had emerged -- particularly between Barth and Bultmann, who took the demythologizing program in a direction Barth found unacceptable.
Barth himself regarded the Romans commentary as an early and imperfect statement of his theology. He developed his mature position in the multi-volume Church Dogmatics (Kirchliche Dogmatik, 1932-1967), which is generally considered his greatest work. The Romans commentary is the meteor whose impact created the world of twentieth-century Protestant theology; the Church Dogmatics is the sustained intellectual civilization that grew in that landscape.
Theological Significance
The commentary's central contribution is its insistence on the "infinite qualitative distinction between time and eternity" -- a phrase Barth took from Kierkegaard -- as the basic theological axiom. God is wholly Other; the divine is not the apex of the human, not the ground of human aspiration, not the conclusion of human reasoning. This radical divine transcendence, argued from Romans, demolished the assumptions of liberal theology and forced a reconception of all the basic loci of doctrine.
Legacy
The Romans commentary inaugurated the neo-orthodox movement and reshaped Protestant theology in the twentieth century. Its indirect influence extends to liberation theology (through its political implications), to narrative theology (through its attention to the actual language of Scripture), and to much of contemporary evangelical scholarship.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should read the entire letter to the Romans alongside the commentary, with particular attention to Romans 1:16-17 (the theme verse), 3:21-26 (the righteousness of God), 6:1-11 (death and resurrection with Christ), 8:1-39 (life in the Spirit and hope of glory), and 11:33-36 (the doxology of divine mystery).
Further Reading
- Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (English trans. 1976) -- the standard biography. - George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth (1991) -- a clear and reliable guide to Barth's mature theology. - Bruce McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (1995) -- the definitive scholarly study of Barth's theological development.